Eddy: How and why more Amateur Draft picks are making the majors

From Matt Eddy at Baseball America on July 23, 2013:

Baseball America determined that roughly one in six signed picks—17.2 percent, actually—from the 1987-2008 drafts went on to play in the big leagues. Today, we’ll see how that rate compares with historical marks and explore the reasons for the change.

Rresearch conducted by BA founder Allan Simpson and published in 2003 indicates that 22.8 percent of signed picks from the top 20 rounds of the 1965 through ’95 drafts played in the major leagues.

The graduation rate for draft picks in today’s game is slightly higher. In the 22 drafts we studied for this exercise, we found that roughly a quarter of signed draft picks (25.4 percent) from the top 20 rounds reached the major leagues for at least one game.

Breaking it down one step further: In the first 10 years of our sample, 1987-96, the graduation rate was 26.3 percent, whereas 24.6 percent of signed draft picks had reached the big leagues (through the first half of 2013) from the second decade of the sample, 1997 through ’08. That 24.6 percent rate will surely rise as players continue to reach the majors from the more-recent drafts, but an additional 90 players would need to graduate in order to match the 26.3 percent rate from 1987-96.

Regardless of which graduation rate you reference, roughly one-quarter of signed draft picks from the top 20 rounds will appear in the majors, though perhaps the proliferation of international talent in today’s game has muted the impact of the more-recent draft classes. That trend might signal a decline in draft-pick graduation rate going forward.